Mistakes are inevitable, teach valuable lessons

By Amber Kelly | Howard College

Published 4:15 pm, Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Last spring, after I accepted the additional duties as dean of general studies, a good friend gave me a congratulatory T-shirt, which simply states: “Mistakes Were Made.” At the time it seemed ironic, a jab at me about the tough road I had selected. In the past few months, however, it has taken on a much richer meaning. This side of the desk, as one of my predecessors calls it, reveals myriad mistakes made at every level — students, instructors, staff, administration — we are all mistake makers. How we deal with mistakes is what defines us.

With all of our push toward success, we often forget how to recover from a mistake, or by extension, how to fail. Failure, as unpleasant as it is, builds resilience and survival skills. Much as we might wish it otherwise, we will make mistakes or things just don’t turn out the way we had hoped. We will stumble, fall and downright wipe out. Little mistakes and failures are easier to live with. Recovering from them is simpler. When things escalate, it becomes increasingly challenging for us to bounce back, or sometimes even acknowledge the issue in the first place.

I see this all the time with my students. Many of them never have been taught how to fail or how to be accountable for their actions. So when they don’t get the grade they want or they make a mistake, their reactions are counterproductive. Some become combative, believing that the error is someone else’s fault (usually mine). Others use their past to argue why their failure is impossible (“I have always made good grades”). Many explode into excuses. And then there are those who just shut down. They stop coming to class or turning in work because they have become defeated by a setback. In the absence of resilience, we defeat ourselves.

From the instructional side, my students love catching me in a mistake. A typo in a PowerPoint, a misspelled word, a mis-keyed quiz — they relish it. Some instructors get defensive; I own my mistakes for all my students to see. Last year, for example, I gave my history students fill-in-the-blank quiz. Epic fail. The next class I apologized to the students for not preparing them for the quiz and spent the class going over the material. I did not shame them for my judgment in error. In the classroom, I want my students to know that I am not perfect, and I don’t pretend to be. They need to see why the tips I give them for proofing and learning from errors apply to everyone, not just them. Moreover, they need to see that everyone messes up, no matter age or education level.

Beyond the classroom, resilience is an essential part of being a functional member of society. It may sound terrible to say this, but I think it is important for my own children to understand what it is to fail so that they can learn to overcome. For example, last year my daughter auditioned for “The Nutcracker.” I was a nervous wreck because it was the first time she had really done something in which she might not be successful. Before she auditioned, we talked about what she hoped to gain from the experience and how she would handle it if she didn’t get into the show. Her response was what I had hoped: “I will have fun and dance harder in class this year to prepare for next year.” (She got in.)

Particularly with mistakes, it is tempting to fall into the blame cycle. We want to know who to blame; if we are the ones at fault, we want to point out where others went wrong, too. Rather than focusing on a solution, we get stuck in a hamster wheel of finger-pointing. What purpose is served by identifying the parties who caused the issue? Ideally, it should be to make sure that the person understands the mistake and knows how to proceed in the future, though I rarely see that. Instead, I see people wanting someone to blame — which I suspect is to make themselves feel better, particularly if part of the responsibility falls on them. Accountability is crucial — people should take responsibility for their actions, good and bad. More important though, is figuring out how to fix the problem.

Be it a mistake or simply an unavoidable failure, how we get up when we stumble tells more about us than the cause of the fall. Begin by accepting the mistake or failure. You messed up. We all do. Accept it. Acknowledge it, both to yourself and to others. Say sorry and mean it. Then figure out what you can learn from it. Finally, most crucially, use what you have learned. We will make mistakes. We will mess up in spectacular ways no one could have anticipated. Hopefully we will also grow from those mess-ups in equally spectacular ways.

Amber Kelly is assistant professor of English/history and dean of General Studies at Howard College in Big Spring.